Ethics acts as one of the brightest guiding lights for professionals operating in the healthcare industry. It covers how providers deal with patients daily. Ethics also covers your staff’s relationship with co-workers, patients, and vendors.

With countless ethical dilemmas visiting healthcare organizations on a daily basis, what can the management do to ensure ethical behavior is deep-rooted within their organization’s culture?

From incorporating ethics in every aspect of the organization’s culture to designing a solid system of reporting, here are seven critical ways to promote a culture of ethics.

Integrate Ethics in Every Aspect of Your Culture

Ethics is not a standalone element of your corporate culture. Rather, it is the very heart of it. Whether formal or informal, it is critical to incorporate ethics into every element of your organization’s culture.

This includes asking ethics-related questions when hiring new candidates, laying out company values during onboarding, offering job-specific ethics education, and including ethical behavior as a core element of performance reviews. Reinforcing ethical behavior is not synonymous with telling your staff what not to do. Instead, it’s about ensuring they understand and respect the value of ethics.

Encouraging ethical behavior, however, is not enough. You must create a speak-up culture where your staff can communicate their problems without any fear of retaliation. The steps you take to carve a culture of ethics demand the absolute support of the C-suite. Leaders must not only endorse ethical behavior but they must also lead by example to ensure their team emulates similar behavior.

Establish and Stick to the Code of Ethics

For any healthcare organization, the code of ethics outlines both patient care concerns and management considerations. It is the roadmap toward building a long-lasting culture of ethics. The institute and its execs are expected to adhere to laws and regulations and always put their best ethical foot forward.

There must be no room for conflicts of interest; if they arise, they must be disclosed and addressed immediately. The code requires management to prioritize the patients before anything else and offer quality care. Management must also design a workplace that is inclusive, professional, and supportive.

Set Clear Expectations

Aside from establishing a solid code of ethics, it is critical to outline a clear purpose for your institution. What are the values that would guide your organization? What ethical standards does your organization aim for? How can you ensure your workforce makes decisions based on your organization’s values and code of ethics?

Once you have your code and your expectations ready, it’s time to promote them using all your communication channels. The goal here is to raise awareness and ensure your team understands the difference between “what is legal,” and “what is right.”

Establish An Engaging Training Program

If your organization’s ethical culture is a monument, training is the set of bricks that will help build it. After all, you cannot craft a culture of ethics unless your employees are “trained to do the right thing,”

Given how important healthcare ethics training is, it’s critical to craft a program that your employees will stick to. Make sure training is not only effective but also highly engaging. Increase the engagement meter by including role play, short videos, skits, and quizzes. Have your trainees “actively participate” instead of just “listening passively.”

Finally, make the training process easy and interesting to understand so your employees truly remember and apply what they’ve learned.

Reinforce it with Ongoing Education

Ethics-related training and education are not one-time tasks. Laws and regulations surrounding compliance in healthcare evolve constantly. The values your caregivers uphold play a massive role in your patients’ well-being. Your staff’s relationships with their co-workers and patients ultimately determine the success of your organization.

You can see ethics as a practice. It requires constant training and monitoring. Ensure that your staff prioritizes human values – like compassionate treatment of patients and their family members, ethical decision-making, and more – only when they receive ongoing ethics-related education.

Schedule periodic training sessions to both reinforce the value of ethics among your staff and keep them updated with the current regulations. Keep track of reports of misconduct, analyze previous investigations, and determine how you can make training more effective.

Design a Solid System of Communication (and Promote Free Expression)

This involves erasing the negative stigma associated with whistle-blowing. Let’s face it, when an employee thinks they might face retaliation if they report an issue, they will not take the risk of raising their voice.

Make your staff members feel safe and encouraged about putting their concerns forth. Explain to them how “speaking up” allows your organization to improve. Build a personal rapport with staff members to ensure minor issues don’t translate into major ethical lapses. Put a solid anonymous system of reporting in place and take swift action each time a complaint knocks at your organization’s door.

Incentivize Ethical Behavior

It’s natural to penalize an employee for misconduct. So, why do most organizations let ethical actions go unnoticed?

To create a space where doing the right thing is encouraged, the management needs to reward ethical behavior. This can be done in a variety of ways. When a staff member does the right thing, the management can take a moment to thank them publicly. You can even incorporate ethical behavior in performance reviews and consider ethics when the time comes to promote an employee.

Remember, what’s rewarded is repeated. When one staff member is rewarded for ethical behavior, the entire workforce will naturally follow suit.

A Final Word

You may have taken every step to promote ethical conduct in your healthcare institution. But how can you ensure the strategies you’ve implemented are bringing real results?

This is where the need for periodic audits comes in. An ethics audit reviews your code of ethics, analyzes incidents of misconduct and the quality of investigation, assesses individual employee awareness of your organization’s values, and points out the management’s commitment to ethics.

Audits also ensure similar incidents of misconduct don’t re-appear, determine elements that may be weakening your culture of ethics, and reveal areas that need more focus. In short, audits are critical for constant analysis and improvement of your organization’s ethical culture.